PocketTorah is designed to help you learn the weekly Torah and Haftarah portion anywhere, on iPad, iPhone, iPod & Android devices (downloadhere).

The developers, Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz, have also released aweb version of the application, that can be viewed in Safari on any desktop or laptop computer. This means that in addition to being in your pocket, PocketTorah can be used in classrooms, on interactive whiteboards and with any other computer or device that is capable of running the web browser.

The PocketTorah app includes the entire text of the Torah and Haftorah in Hebrew and English (1917 Jewish Publication Society translation). With a simple click or touch of any verse number the corresponding Hebrew with proper trope is chanted, while the corresponding text is highlighted. The “Tikkun View”, allows users, with a simple swipe of the finger, to choose whether to view text with or without vowels.

App includes also a “Commentary Module” that contains various commentaries from JTS, HUC, the OU, Torah.org and others.

“But that is not all“, says Russel Neiss, “We are not only releasing the completed app for free, we are also releasing all of the creative content. The audio files and their corresponding meta-data are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and the source code for the project will be released under the GNU GPL3. This means that anyone can take these files, and remix, tweak and build upon them so long you credit PocketTorah and license your new creations under the same identical terms. This will give coders, artists, educators and others the opportunity to take our work and build upon it, rather than having to simply start from scratch if they want to achieve something similar.

We are doing this because we care about Jewish learning. But we also hope that a side effect of creating a tool that gives Jews the ability to interact with their sacred texts will simultaneously demonstrate the viability open-source Jewish software development.”

In February Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz have released PocketTorah Trope training app, which now became part of the Pocket Torah full version, but still is available as a standalone app.

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